Why Is Version Control Still So Complicated in 2024?

I'm a self taught programmer too, but I've also worked professionally for a while now. What saved my ass was a good IDE and GUI.

I prefer Jetbrains, which has autosaves, local undo/redo and backups, AND visual git and diffing all built-in. I use git thirty times a day. But the git command line? Maybe 3 or 4 times a year. The IDE is that good. They're usually free for personal / noncommercial projects and very affordable for individual licenses for commercial stuff too.

If you prefer VScode, the Gitlens extension is similar. Gitkraken is another standalone good one.

The git CLI was made by the Linux dude. Much respect, of course, but it was a tool not meant for mere mortals. Its syntax is incredibly unintuitive and error prone and I try to avoid it as much as possible. A good git GUI abstracts that and makes the everyday stuff a lot more bearable.

A good visual 3-way diffing will make merge conflicts a hundred times easier to resolve. The one in Jetbrains is really good. Then to make life even easier, you don't need AI for that, you need good collaboration practices (small, limited PRs, good commit messages explaining the what, good in-code comments explaining the why).

Natural language search would be great. You can already integrate LLMs into the IDE and ask it questions, so I guess that's one step.

Some of these things like a visual history of changes you can get from using a git client like sourcetree. For other things you listed I’m not sure that they actually make your life easier. For instance, AI conflict resolution sounds great but what happens when it accidentally picks the wrong changes and you need to manually fix those?

I think git has a steep learning curve to begin with but once you spend some time using it things start to get a bit easier.

    > Autosaves...

There was a project shared on HN that had this feature.

I think it was Grace (a source control client/server written in F#/C# on .NET): https://github.com/ScottArbeit/Grace?tab=readme-ov-file#grac...

    > Grace CLI includes a command - grace watch - that watches your working directory for changes, and keeps a live connection to Grace Server, connecting you in real-time to your team around the world.
    > 
    > grace watch takes action for you, whether that's automatically uploading and downloading new file versions, processing notifications from other repo users, or running custom actions that you create.

---

    > Or am I just bad at Git

I'm bad at `git`. So I pretty much keep my workflow as simple as possible.

    git pull
    git branch -b feat/some-feature    
    git add .
    git commit -m "Added it"
    git pull origin main
    git push
    git switch main

That's about it. Anything more and I'm looking it up.

Git definitely feels like it was made for power users, not beginners.

You may want to try mercurial or pijul to see if those approaches are more intuitive for you.

    Automated merging and conflict resolution powered by AI

lol no

While we're at it, why not have the AI automatically detect all bugs and fix them? /s

> While we're at it, why not have the AI automatically detect all bugs and fix them? /s

Why not?

Nothing's going to catch all bugs, but there's plenty of low-hanging fruit that could benefit from automated scanning. I think GitHub already does have LLM-suggested fixes for security issues[0], even.

Same with merge conflicts - majority are not that complex/deep. Offering a sensible resolution seems within the reach of current models (with good integration and fine-tuning). Could maybe even have a model check and warn of the cases that ORT would currently merge uncritically despite producing broken code.

[0]: https://github.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/303457375-1a8...